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As Egg Donations Mount, So Do Health Concerns

Doctors say there is no biological reason that donating eggs would cause infertility, but they also cannot say for sure that it doesn't. The long-term health effects of egg donation have never actually been studied, in large part because the high cost of studies doesn't "seem justified in terms of what the possible risks [of the procedure] might be," according to Sean Tipton, spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). He points out that egg donors undergo the same drug treatment as IVF patients — hormone injections and other drugs that stimulate follicles, promote egg maturation and prevent the release of eggs before they can be retrieved — and that studies of the latter population show it is safe.

But some women's health advocates say that evidence isn't strong enough, calling for further study and a national, trackable registry of egg donors. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) logs the number of donated eggs transferred to infertile women each year — there were some 15,500 in 2006, the most recent year for which data are available — no one knows how many individual donors those eggs came from, who they were or whether they were exceeding industry guidelines of six donations in a lifetime. (The guidelines are intended to limit the number of offspring from a particular donor and to prevent overexposure to fertility drugs, but they are not based on scientific data.)

You can read more about the debate about risk here:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1888459,00.html?iid=tsmodule